Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation

Jack Kerouac’s birthday is March 12. Today we remember the Beat writer and his friends: “the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing ... but burn, burn, burn like roman candles across the night.”
NEW YORK CITY—American poet and writer Jack Kerouac, 1953.

Thirty-nine years ago this week in Los Angeles, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. A funeral train carried his body from New York City to Washington, D.C. In RFK Funeral Train, Paul Fusco documents the funeral train procession. Despite the hot weather, hundreds of thousands of people stood along the train tracks waiting to pay their respects.